I'm considering buying the WD10EARS. How audible is the sound it makes when it parks its heads?

I'm looking for a quiet drive but I've seen some people say these drives can make an annoying clicking sound during parking. I read through most of this thread but I didn't get an answer.

Well I have a WD10EADS-00M2B0 and the sound is definitely audible. The "how" part is very subjective. I used the firmware hack to change head-parking time longer so it wouldn't do this. The firmware hack might not work for all drives and it voids warranty (though I don't know if they will/can check it and I haven't seen anyone brick theirs).

Oh and I would not describe the sound as a short high-pitched click, its more like a "clunk," if that's any help.

I got 2 WD 15EARS drives a few months ago.
After the initial difficulty partitioning with the 4K sectors, I was pretty happy, the drives were pretty quiet and cool, with just a little muted "chirp" when seeking.

Lately though, there is an irregular thump from the drives, sort of like hitting a coffee cup with the rubber eraser on a pencil. A bit worrisome.
smartctl -A /dev/sda shows no errors at all.

So I started reading this thread in detail. Jeepers!

Last night, I checked Load_Cyle with smartctl -A /dev/sda
and got about 90,000 for each drive, and was incrementing several times per minute. Ok, a bit high, but hdparm should be able to help....

So I tried "hdparm -S 253 /dev/sda" (IIRC it was 253, the system replied "drive spin down set to 1 hour").
But further checks showed Load_Cycle incrementing as before.

So I've decided not to worry about the Load_Cycle thing, but that thump noise is really bugging me. It wasn't there when I first started using the drives. Time to make sure that my backups are up to snuff....

Well I have a WD10EADS-00M2B0 and the sound is definitely audible. The "how" part is very subjective. I used the firmware hack to change head-parking time longer so it wouldn't do this. The firmware hack might not work for all drives and it voids warranty (though I don't know if they will/can check it and I haven't seen anyone brick theirs).

Oh and I would not describe the sound as a short high-pitched click, its more like a "clunk," if that's any help.

So I bought the WD10EARS and I don't hear the head parking sound. The drive is pretty quiet overall, except for a weird buzzing sound it sometimes makes (but not all the time). When or how much exactly it makes that sound, I don't know, because it's quiet enough so that it's hard to hear it over the noise of my WD6401AALS, especially when the PC case is closed.

Trying to decide on a couple of quiet drives to mount inside a disk array enclosure and been alerted about the auto-park issues which I don't completely understand (I'm not that deep into the tech-talk) I'm even more confused after having read this thread (and others).

1) Can someone please tell me WHY those WD drives auto-park? Don't most OSes have an "energy" feature where you configure when drives should shut down and the computer sleep after a period of inactivity?

2) Is auto-park, auto-sleep and auto-spindown the same thing?
I already have a WD drive (WD5000AAKB) placed in an external enclosure where I've experienced that the drive likes to spin down after a while of not accessing it. This is very frustrating whenever I suddenly need to save a file etc. as the computer partly hangs because the drive doesn't respond.
The solution is to turn off the drive (on/off power button on the enclosure), then on again to spin it up.

3) I've heard about "WDidle 3" (in case people are still having problems finding it, it's can be downloaded from here or here), but also read that some people are unable to turn off those problematic features on their drives while others again are having success. So what's the deal?

4) I've read that these drives are unsuitable for RAID configurations because of something called TLER. I'm not entirely sure what TLER is, but having read earlier in the thread that people are having issues with it I thought I'd mention this page which explains how to disable it in order to make the drives RAID compatible.
Now I'm planning to use the drives as stand-alone drives, but I might look into mirroring, which is one kind of RAID of course.
Would I need to disable TLER for that?

Furthermore, most (all?) of these configuration tools are for DOS. I'm on a Mac (Mac OSX), so I'd have to bring the drive over to a PC-owning friend for reconfiguring, but I'm also confused about exactly what to enter and how to start the utility (I read that some people are having issues with that as well).

Basically, I just want a silent SATA drive which works! And there doesn't seem to be that many options around.

@silence_seeker:
4) the reason for need of TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) in RAID arrays is that in case of failure, without TLER the HDD tries to read the damaged sector for a long time (read minutes). And because the drive doesn't answer while trying to read the damaged sector, the RAID controllers drops the problematic drive out of array because it is not responding. If you have TLER, the handling of situation is left to RAID controller, thus it can choose different solutions, not just drop the drive from array, it can inform the user etc etc.

If you have TLER, the handling of situation is left to RAID controller, thus it can choose different solutions, not just drop the drive from array, it can inform the user etc etc.

I see. But that's hardware configurations where a circuit board is specifically built for RAID setup you're referring to, right?
I don't have a RAID enclosure (but rather a JBOD enclosure with room for 4 drives. This one to be exact), but I believe you can set up various RAID configurations in MacOSX using the "disk utility" application. I think disk mirroring could be useful at some stage. Would I have to be concerned about TLER in such a case?

No, these are not the same things. When the WD green parks its heads, the disks continue spinning. Head parking is not a feature that all drives support, so not every OS can manage it and I'm not even sure that the drives let the OS manage it.

Quote:

3) I've heard about "WDidle 3" (in case people are still having problems finding it, it's can be downloaded from here or here), but also read that some people are unable to turn off those problematic features on their drives while others again are having success. So what's the deal?

In my case the first utility I used was V1.00 and it didn't work. Later on I found the v1.03 that did the trick. The utility does not officially support these drives.

Lobuni: since these are different things, do you know if auto-spindown can also be disabled on WD drives (actually on hard drives in general)? Apart from WD wanting to kill their own drives as quickly as possible (just outside the warranty period of course) I can't understand what's useful about these features.

If the user needs to access the drive it should be un-parked and the drive should be spinning. If he/she needs to put it to "sleep" then the energy feature can be configured for that.
Or am I missing something here?

As for the utility (WDidle 3) -can I risk that if I buy a WD10EARS, WD15EARS or WD20EARS today that the utility won't work with it and that there will be no way to disable these silly "features" (bugs) at all?
In that case I'd be better off looking at other drives, but which one(s)?

I just got a wd20eads and use it with ubuntu. My load count does not go up as much as described: 2 in 24h. Maybe people have a problematic kernel or something?. Other than that, this thing is heavy as a brick, but as silent as my old samsung 501lj. A meter away is not audible over the light woooosh from the fans.

1) Can someone please tell me WHY those WD drives auto-park? Don't most OSes have an "energy" feature where you configure when drives should shut down and the computer sleep after a period of inactivity?

2) Is auto-park, auto-sleep and auto-spindown the same thing?

Spindown and head park are two different things. The WD GPs park their heads to reduce power consumption. They are also not the only drives that does that, many 2.5" HDDs does as well and not only WD drives.

silence_seeker wrote:

Furthermore, most (all?) of these configuration tools are for DOS. I'm on a Mac (Mac OSX), so I'd have to bring the drive over to a PC-owning friend for reconfiguring, but I'm also confused about exactly what to enter and how to start the utility (I read that some people are having issues with that as well).

Basically, I just want a silent SATA drive which works! And there doesn't seem to be that many options around.

I'm not familiar with Macs but surly you could boot into DOS using a USB-stick, boot CD or similar? You can run Linux on a Mac after all.

I like the WD GPs but if you don't like the head parks I would recommend Samsung. They have a few very nice models. Not as good as the WD GPs imho, but still.

silence_seeker wrote:

since these are different things, do you know if auto-spindown can also be disabled on WD drives (actually on hard drives in general)? Apart from WD wanting to kill their own drives as quickly as possible (just outside the warranty period of course) I can't understand what's useful about these features.

If the user needs to access the drive it should be un-parked and the drive should be spinning. If he/she needs to put it to "sleep" then the energy feature can be configured for that.Or am I missing something here?

Spindown is usually controlled by the OS. If you have a vanilla install of Windows or Linux, the drive will spin as long as the computer is running.

And again, have we seen any dead WD GPs that have died because of this feature? Are WD GPs less reliable than other HDDs?
Not that I am aware of.

Head parks are useful when one is interested in lowering the power consumption while the HDD is idle, without the need to spin down the drive. With the WD GPs in my Linux file server I use both features.

Again, if you don't like this feature, don't buy a WD GP. Simple as that.

I'm not familiar with Macs but surly you could boot into DOS using a USB-stick, boot CD or similar? You can run Linux on a Mac after all.

I found an application called DOSbox which I just tried out. It worked and allowed me to run WDidle, but it didn't recognize any of my drives. Perhaps not so strange since I don't have a Caviar green yet. I do however have a WD5000AAKB, so at this stage I don't know if WDidle won't recognize any drives apart from the ones in its documentation, if it won't recognize any drives connected via USB or Firewire (Firewire in an external enclosure in my case), or if the emulation via DOSbox causes problems.It would be nice to know this before buying the WD drives, or else I'd have to ask others with PCs for help.

Quote:

I like the WD GPs but if you don't like the head parks I would recommend Samsung. They have a few very nice models. Not as good as the WD GPs imho, but still.

I bought a Samsung HD400LD a few years ago because it was supposedly one of the quietest drives around. That may be true in part, but it vibrates like crazy, with the end result being a very noisy drive indeed. So no more Samsung for me.

Quote:

Head parks are useful when one is interested in lowering the power consumption while the HDD is idle, without the need to spin down the drive. With the WD GPs in my Linux file server I use both features.

Hmmmm... so you'd park the heads if the drive isn't to be used in a little while, but when not used for a long time you'd spin it down (less inconvenient than physically switching on/off the drive)?With my Mac I'd simply drag a drive's icon to the trashcan to spin down the drive, then wake it up again with "Disk utility". I don't see the need for any intermediate stage (head parking), so I would like to disable that feature.

Quote:

Again, if you don't like this feature, don't buy a WD GP. Simple as that.

I found an application called DOSbox which I just tried out. It worked and allowed me to run WDidle, but it didn't recognize any of my drives. Perhaps not so strange since I don't have a Caviar green yet. I do however have a WD5000AAKB, so at this stage I don't know if WDidle won't recognize any drives apart from the ones in its documentation, if it won't recognize any drives connected via USB or Firewire (Firewire in an external enclosure in my case), or if the emulation via DOSbox causes problems.It would be nice to know this before buying the WD drives, or else I'd have to ask others with PCs for help.

DOSBox is an emulator. Works great for older DOS games and such, but not for "system stuff" like upgrading firmware. I would try downloading a DOS bootdisk and use an USB stick instead.

silence_seeker wrote:

I bought a Samsung HD400LD a few years ago because it was supposedly one of the quietest drives around. That may be true in part, but it vibrates like crazy, with the end result being a very noisy drive indeed. So no more Samsung for me.

Yeah, they had problems with vibrations a while back. Don't know how their current models are when it comes to vibration.
I would not judge a manufacturer based on a single model though. Hard to buy any HDD then since everyone has had a bad model in the past.

I got 2 WD 15EARS drives a few months ago.After the initial difficulty partitioning with the 4K sectors, I was pretty happy, the drives were pretty quiet and cool, with just a little muted "chirp" when seeking.

Lately though, there is an irregular thump from the drives, sort of like hitting a coffee cup with the rubber eraser on a pencil. A bit worrisome.smartctl -A /dev/sda shows no errors at all.

So I started reading this thread in detail. Jeepers!

Last night, I checked Load_Cyle with smartctl -A /dev/sda and got about 90,000 for each drive, and was incrementing several times per minute. Ok, a bit high, but hdparm should be able to help....

So I tried "hdparm -S 253 /dev/sda" (IIRC it was 253, the system replied "drive spin down set to 1 hour"). But further checks showed Load_Cycle incrementing as before.

So I've decided not to worry about the Load_Cycle thing, but that thump noise is really bugging me. It wasn't there when I first started using the drives. Time to make sure that my backups are up to snuff....

-joe

UPDATE:

Couldn't figure out why hdparm did not work for me, Load
_Cycle was still incrementing fast, so I thought maybe APM (Linux Automatic Power Management) was parking the drive heads. Loaded up gnome_power_manager utility and told the system never to park the heads. Seems to do the trick. Load_Cycle is now only incrementing about once per hour. So I should get about 61,000 counts per year. Ok by me. If the drive bricks, I've got backups, and the WD 3 year warranty. Life (and computers) is not perfect.

It is really curious. I only get a few head parks every day with my wd20eads. Using ubuntu 10.04 (I get confused with the animal names ). How can this be so variable?.

Glad your system is behaving well.

There are a number of separate subsystems at work, all with
varying policies and timers. There are bios power saving settings,
ACPI and APM settings - mostly for laptops, but in my case seemed
to affect head parking even though I am totally on wall power, and the device settings through hdparm.
Confusing, but I can't readily see a solution.

I got a WD 1.5 EARS drive as a replacement to another drive...Very quiet indeed, but the load/unload is quite high really...

Will you be running WDidle 3 to rectify the problem? If you do, please tell us how it went.

Also got a WD20EADS as a replacement for a 1.5TB Seagate drive with reallocated sectors...
Well, I haven't been getting any clicking from the drives, that might worry me, so I don't know if I should go into the trouble...may keep it as is for now and see how things develop...

It seems however that it may be time to update to a newer motherboard...
...WD15EARS sector drive was not recognized properly when connected to my sil3112 embedded controller, not recognized as an advanced format drive actually...
...the WD20EADS drive, on the other hand, the first 5 minutes after booting somehow conflicts with the smart reading of a Seagate 1.5TB drive, with the latter giving incorrect feature readouts...it is recognized as WD20EADS with 1.5TB capacity, its reallocated sector report increases (to 5 of them, while there is actually only 1) and a failure prediction immediately shoots up...
After about five minutes have passed, the SMART program reports smart values correctly...

I've got a NForce4 mobo with 4 sata nforce connectors and 4 secondary sil3112 connectors (s939 platform)...I had bought an Asrock SATA3 card (Marvell chip), but I doubt it's gonna work correctly on a non PCIe 2.0 slot, plus the vga's airflow would be greatly hindered by the addon card...

Are you saying that most of the problems with these WD Caviar green (WDxxEARS) drives are due to Windows/Linux and/or PC motherboard incompatibilities?

After reading several discussions on the subject it may seem that part of the problem is due to the fact that energy saver or SMART software may be in conflict with the "Intellipark" (auto head-park) feature of WD green drives. Or I could be completely wrong of course

I'm basically trying to figure out if I'm just as badly affecting when using it on a Mac system than on a Windows or Linux system.

Well, I cannot generalize...also I don't know if we're talking about the same problems...

The WD15EARS was not recognized as an advanced format drive when connected to the sil3112 controller...I now keep it connected to the Nfroce4 sata controller...
The WD20EADS somehow conflicted with another drive on the same controller (actually it was the Seagate drive which was not not recognized properly after installing the WD drive), noe that the Seagate drive is removed, these false readouts/recognition of the drive and its smart data was not replicated in the WD20EADs...

Yet both drives produce fast increasing number of load/unload cycles...one is on the Nforce4, the other on the sil3112...
I have HDD Sentinel running all the time, but it checks the drive only in periods of 5 minutes, so I can't really blame this software for the high load/unload cycles I guess...

I get no clicks (although the WD20EADS drive does not seem to have as good vibrational properties as recorded in measurements here), so I don't know whether I should be worried because of the increase in this smart data category...

Hmmmm... I hadn't thought of the fact that with SMART software running that alone would contribute to a higher load. Then again I assume (because of discussions like this one and elsewhere) that the load count is still very much higher for these particular drives than many other drives.

On the Mac platform there is no support for SMART when using external hard drives (i.e. drives connected via Firewire or USB). So on my Powerbook I can only check the SMART reading on my internal drive. A flaw or feature. I have no idea.

I was referring to the 8 second default head-parking ("Intellipark") of WD Green drives which I want to make sure can be turned off before purchasing (I see no good reason why the drive should park every 8 seconds, possibly prematurely wearing out the drive and I assume takes longer to react once I read/write to the drive again).

But your posting also reminds me of another subject where I've heard that some people recommend you don't buy these (or any?) drives above 1TB (or was it 1.5TB?). I don't know if this was in the context of that new extended format which these drives, which apparently causes problems with Windows XP or something else. Since I run MacOS that shouldn't be a problem for me, but I want to be sure before purchasing.

Hmmmm... I hadn't thought of the fact that with SMART software running that alone would contribute to a higher load. Then again I assume (because of discussions like this one and elsewhere) that the load count is still very much higher for these particular drives than many other drives.

I was referring to the 8 second default head-parking ("Intellipark") of WD Green drives which I want to make sure can be turned off before purchasing (I see no good reason why the drive should park every 8 seconds, possibly prematurely wearing out the drive and I assume takes longer to react once I read/write to the drive again).

But your posting also reminds me of another subject where I've heard that some people recommend you don't buy these (or any?) drives above 1TB (or was it 1.5TB?). I don't know if this was in the context of that new extended format which these drives, which apparently causes problems with Windows XP or something else. Since I run MacOS that shouldn't be a problem for me, but I want to be sure before purchasing.

SMART (daemon) running or not should not be a problem for any drive.
You're correct, the Intellipark feature is the problem, and solutions and help exists for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

A separate problem is the new 4096 Byte sectors. Basically, it's only a problem for partitioning. Once again, there are solutions and help for any OS. All drives will move to this format soon, so I imagine that this is only a temporary problem.

SMART (daemon) running or not should not be a problem for any drive.You're correct, the Intellipark feature is the problem, and solutions and help exists for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I didn't know there were already working solutions. I know about WDidle 3which is a DOS utility, but there are discussions and uncertainty if it really does remove the "intellipark" feature or just extend it for a longer idle period, and if it actually works for all WD green drives (also recently sold ones).

Until your posting I haven't heard of any other utilities, and certainly not for Mac and Linux.
How do I remove the "Intellipark" feature using a Mac?

SMART (daemon) running or not should not be a problem for any drive.You're correct, the Intellipark feature is the problem, and solutions and help exists for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I didn't know there were already working solutions. I know about WDidle 3which is a DOS utility, but there are discussions and uncertainty if it really does remove the "intellipark" feature or just extend it for a longer idle period, and if it actually works for all WD green drives (also recently sold ones).

Until your posting I haven't heard of any other utilities, and certainly not for Mac and Linux.How do I remove the "Intellipark" feature using a Mac?

My apologies.
I knew there were Linux and Windows utilities and helps, but (after a thorough google) I can't find anything for Mac. wierd. Sorry I can't help.

For crying out loud! WD doesn't even tell consumers about this little "feature" which causes read/write delays (each time the drive unparks) and I assume a premature death because of unnecessary tear and wear.

Unfortunately (WD surely aren't deserving of my money with tactics like the above) WD seems to come out tops when talking about silent drives. Are the Caviar Blue or Black drives worth looking into? As far as I know they don't have this silly bug built in (or do they?).

I have a WD15EARS, and I used the wdidle utility to turn off intellipark. It seems to work. I've had the drive for 2 weeks, and used wdidle 1 week ago, and the load_cycle_count is only 414. Which doesn't seem too bad to me.

peternm22: yes, indeed very different to what has been said there. The problem it seems is to get a proper answer from WD themselves.
I just looked at their specs/info page for Caviar Green, and there is absolutely no mention of Intelliseek anywhere. Seems to me they added that feature just to save a few mW of power (in order to maintain their "green" image) but causing other issues which they'd rather not admit

If you can access your drive, could you check if there is any production date on it? It would be very interesting to hear if the date is before the end of 2009 or more recently.

Also, do you remember what you entered in WDidle in order to disable Intellipark? Seems a lot of people have gotten no response from the drive or setting it has gotten no effect.
But from your posting it sounds like you've confirmed that disabling Intelliseek actually works.

Last edited by silence_seeker on Sat Jun 19, 2010 1:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

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